Monday, February 18, 2008

Angel's Egg (1985)

"Angel's Egg (天使のたまご, Tenshi no Tamago?) is a Japanese anime feature film produced by Tokuma Shoten in 1985. A collaboration between popular artist Yoshitaka Amano and director Mamoru Oshii, it incorporates surrealistic and existentialist qualities but very little dialogue, making it a commonly cited example of progressive anime.

Angel's Egg follows the daily life of a young girl in a surreal world of darkness and shadows.

The girl, whose name we do not learn, is the keeper of a mysterious egg. She spends her time collecting bottles and artifacts in a gothic, dead city. A man, whose name also remains a mystery, arrives in the dark town one day riding a machine and wearing a cross on his back. The two meet and talk, though their dialogue consists mostly of the single, repeated question "Who are you?".

Meanwhile, shadow fish appear within the town, and then the many statues which line it come alive and begin hunting the fish with spears.

Inside the girl's vast cavernous 'refuge,' which contains many strange fossils and her collection, the man tells the girl a tale similar to Noah's Ark. He waits for the girl to fall asleep and breaks the egg.

The girl reacts in anguish and follows the departing man, only to fall into a ravine of water and die. Her dying exhalation under the water blossoms into bubbles of 'eggs' on the surface. A symbolic ending of apocalypse and rebirth is mixed with a gradual reveal of the story's world which is highly abstract and ambiguous." - quote source from wikipedia.